Chapter VIII: Letter 5

In the early days of my youth I was struck by a French novel which I have not met since; it was called _Arminius_. Possibly it has no great merits, but at the time it had a great influence on me, and I remember the chief incidents to this day.

We all know something of the meeting and conflict between two different worlds; the one, the classical world of culture, corrupt and effete; the other, savage as a wild beast of the forest, but full of slumbering forces and chaotic impulses. But we only, for the most part, know the official public side of this contact, not that side concerned with details and the privacy of home life. We know the events in the rough, but not individual fortunes; not the dramas in which lives were silently broken and perished in personal struggle, in which blood was replaced by bitter tears, and devastated towns by ruined families and forgotten graves.

The author of _Arminius_ tried to reproduce these two worlds—the one moving from the jungle to history, the other from history into the grave—as they met at the domestic hearth. In this, world history is reduced to personal gossip, is brought nearer to us, more within our grasp and comprehension.[35]

It never entered my head then that I should find myself in a similar conflict, that a similar conflict would come into my own life with all its ruinous force, and that my hearth would be devastated and shattered at the meeting of two historic worlds.

In our attitude to the Europeans, in spite of all the points of difference, which I understand quite well, there are points of resemblance to the attitude of the Germans to the Romans. In spite of our exterior, we are still barbarians. Our civilisation is skin-deep, our corruption is crude, our coarse hair bristles through the powder on our heads, and our sunburn shows through the powder on our cheeks. We have plenty of the cunning of savages and the evasiveness of slaves. We are ready to give blows indiscriminately and to fall at a man’s feet, when we are guiltless, but I obstinately repeat we are very far behind the corrosive hereditary subtleties of West European corruption.

Among us, intellectual development serves as a purification and a guarantee—at least it has done so hitherto;[36] exceptions are exceedingly rare, culture among us is a barrier which much that is infamous never crosses; and it is owing to this that all through the reign of Nicholas the government could not succeed in establishing a secret police nor a literature in the pay of the police, like the French.

In Western Europe this is not so, and that is how it is that Russian dreamers who have made their way into freedom readily surrender to any man who touches with sympathy on their holy things, who understands their cherished thoughts, forgetting that for him these holy things have long ago passed into a commonplace, into a convention, that, for the most part, they repeat them possibly even sincerely, but in the way in which a priest, thinking of something else, blesses any one he meets. We forget how many other elements are tangled in the complex, exhausted, morbidly struggling soul of the Western European, how utterly he is exhausted, worn out with envy, penury, vanity and _amour-propre_, and into what a terrible epicureanism of the higher morbidly nervous kind the humiliation, poverty, and struggle of competition have developed.

We find out all this when the blow has fallen; it stuns us. We feel ourselves made fools of, and want to revenge ourselves. Looking at this I sometimes think that much blood will flow from the ‘conflict of these two different forms of culture....’ These lines were written some years ago.

I am still of the same opinion despite the fact that in Europe Russians enjoy the reputation of a most depraved people. This is due to the lack of polish in our conduct and the rustic habits of our landowners. We have convinced the whole world of our viciousness, just as the English have convinced it of their domestic virtue. As a matter of fact, neither the vice nor the virtue goes very deep. Russians abroad not only lead a disorderly life, but boast of their savage and dissolute habits. Unfortunately, being brought into contact as soon as they pass the frontier with the clumsy and servile country of _kellners_ and _hofraths_, the Russians, like half-educated people in general, cease to stand on ceremony, and let themselves go further and further, and in this reckless mood arrive in Paris and London. It has happened to me many times to observe how conspicuous Russians make themselves by absolute trifles, and they keep up the first impression by the sort of defiant _nargue_ with which they refuse to obey the received conventions (though they are models of submissiveness and correctness at home!). A man is recognised as a Russian in the big hotels, because he shouts in the public room, guffaws loudly, and invariably protests at smoking being forbidden in the dining-room. All this aggressiveness of an upper servant outside his master’s house shows far more immaturity and unfamiliarity with freedom than deep depravity; bragging always goes with this moral ‘unripeness.’ Like boys of fourteen, we not only want to drink too much, but to show off to all the world: ‘Look how I have been going it!’ But all the world judges differently. Looking at what the Russians lay bare, it thinks, shaking its head, ‘What must they have concealed?’ And all the while there is nothing there, just as there is nothing in the soldier’s haversack on parade, though it looks as though it were stuffed.

Ages of civilisation, passing from generation to generation, acquire a special bouquet which one does not catch at once; in this the fate of man is similar to the fate of Rhine wine. There is nothing particularly attractive about the propriety that is gained, though it is pleasanter to go by its rules, as it is to go along a well-swept path. We, it must be admitted, are badly swept, and there are a good many hard stones and plenty of mud on our path.

Our breaking-in to culture is fresh in our memory: it was accomplished by rough-and-ready means, just as a peasant taken into the master’s house is shaved like a German and turned into a servant. Renouncing at the command of the Most High the whole structure of the national life, the nobility have obstinately retained all its bad qualities; flinging overboard together with its prejudices the severe decorum and propriety of the national manners, they have retained all the coarse habits of the master and the Tatar lack of respect for self and for others. The oppressive traditional morality of old days has been replaced neither by the aristocratic conception of honour nor the citizen’s conception of public duty and independence; it has been replaced much more simply by German barrack discipline _in the army_, mean servility and cringing dependence _in the public service_, and nothing at all _outside it_.

Outside the government service, the nobleman was transformed from the servant who is beaten to a Peter the Great who is beating; in the country he had full scope: there he became at once corporal, emperor, grand gentleman, and father of his domain. This life of both wolf and enlightener produced colossal monstrosities, from torturers like Bühren and Potyomkin on the grand scale to the hangmen and Potyomkins on a microscopic scale; from Izmailov flogging police captains to Nozdryov with one whisker torn off; from the ‘Araktcheyev of all the Russias’ to the minor Araktcheyevs of battalions and companies who flogged the soldier into his grave; from the bribe-takers of the first three grades to the hungry swarms of clerks who scribbled the poor peasants into their graves; with endless variations of drunken officers, bullies, cardsharpers, heroes of fairs, dog-fanciers, brawlers, devotees of flogging, and seraglio-keepers. Here and there among them is a landowner who has turned a foreigner in order to remain a human being, or a ‘noble soul,’ a Manilov,[37] a turtle-dove of a nobleman, cooing in his mansion beside the stable where chastisement was administered.

One might wonder what good thing could arise, grow, and flourish in this soil between the Araktcheyevs and the Manilovs? What could be reared by these mothers who sent men for soldiers, cut off women’s hair, and beat their servants, by these fathers who fawned on all above them and were savage tyrants to all below them? Yet it was among them that the men of the 14th of December arose, a phalanx of heroes, suckled like Romulus and Remus on the milk of a wild beast.... Finely they throve on it! They were heroes, wrought out of pure steel from head to foot, martyr warriors who went forth consciously to inevitable ruin to awaken the younger generation to new life and to purify the children, born in the midst of brutality and slavishness. But who cleansed their souls with the fire of purification, what virgin force renounced in them its filth and its corruption, and made them the martyrs of the future?

It was in them; that is enough for me for the present. I make a note of it and return to what I was saying: there is a sort of unstable, unbalanced ferment and frenzy in the pothouse debauchery of our vice; it is the delirium of intoxication which has taken hold of an entire class, that has strayed off the path with no serious plan and aim. But it has not that deeply penetrating, deeply rooted, subtle, nervous, intelligent, fatal depravity from which the educated classes of Western Europe are suffering, dying, and decaying.

But how has it come to pass, what moral simoom has blown on the civilised world?... There has always been progress and more progress, there are free institutions, railways, reforms, and telegraphs.

Much that is good is being accomplished, much that is good is being accumulated, but the simoom still blows and blows like a _memento mori_, continually increasing, and sweeping everything in the world before it. To be wroth at this is as useless as to be wroth with the squirrels for losing their fur, at the sea because after full tide, as though to mock us at its very best moment, it begins to ebb. It is high time that we accepted this fluctuation, this rhythm of all creation, this alternation of night and day.

The period of ‘moulting’ in which we have found Western Europe is the hardest; the new fur is scarcely showing while the old skin has grown stiff, like that of the rhinoceros; here is a crack, there is a crack, but _en gros_ it holds fast. This position between two skins is extremely disagreeable. Everything strong suffers, everything weak that struggles to the surface is ruined; the process of renewal is inextricably connected with the process of decay, and there is no telling which will get the upper hand.

Let me explain my thought further in the next letter. Perhaps I shall succeed in proving to you that this is not a _manière de dire_, not subjective indignation (indeed, it is difficult to have a personal quarrel with world history), but a few facts noted by eyes free from the myopia of scholastic pedantry and the blindness of mysticism.